Improv: It’ s a witty man’ s game that no audience member or performer can predict.
According to Jason Lyons, senior biotech major and president of the What’ s So Funny? improv club, no one knows what will happen once the show starts.
“You’ ll be up [on stage] and you don’t know what you are going to say,” said Rebecca Adams, a criminal justice freshman. In the uncertainty of the moment, a player might say something as aimless as “‘triangles are only purple,’and the team members will have to justify that.”
Besides justifying the fact that triangles may or may not be only purple, improv is all about a team effort to create a funny scenario for the audience to enjoy.
“Improv is a team sport and we teach that it’s not about you,” said Lyons. “You aren’t supposed to go out there to tell a joke; you’re supposed to go out there and collectively tell a story. If you try to go out there and make it all about you, you’ll feel very quickly that the joke will fail.”
Improv is a way for individually funny people to come together and create a hilarious show for everyone.
“It’s tricky because you have so many funny people in one room. It’s hard to get everyone to focus on one thing,” said Lyons. “You come here because you don’t think you’ re funny, it’s because you enjoy everyone else’s humor.”
According to Lyons, some performers don’t seem like they’d be funny when you first meet them. Once they are out on stage, however, their demeanor changes and they start cracking jokes left and right.
“The great thing about improv is the chance to see a change in people,” said Lyons.
Not only is improv about teamwork and being witty in any given situation, it’s also about trust between team members.
“All you are doing is putting your trust in someone else,” said Adams. No matter what incoherent nonsense a skit may start with, the other performers “justify it and help you.”
There are several different games the team members play. Brooklynn Meldrum, an Orem resident, loves to play the game “hoedown.” The players must make up a song to a predetermined tune. However, they won’t know the topic of the song until they get a suggestion from the audience. Every game that the team members play, whether it be in a show or for practice, helps build the trust and tight knit family unit that is needed in order to perform well.
“It’s about helping each other so no one is left out,” said Adams. “We support each other in our weirdness and after club meetings, we end up swapping stories. It’ s like we are one big family.”
